


A Minor Mystery (Alone No More Remix)

by Unforgotten



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, M/M, Mpreg, Post-Canon, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 12:56:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11357967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: After D.C., a surprising development disrupts Erik's plans.





	A Minor Mystery (Alone No More Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Minor Mystery](https://archiveofourown.org/works/661094) by [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/pseuds/afrocurl). 



Hands gripping the sink. Feet bracing well apart on the floor. Pants pooling around his ankles. Harsh breathing, the occasional grunt from behind. There's none of the gentleness, none of the joy Erik recalls from their other times; instead, Charles' hands are bruisingly hard on his hips, holding him in place as he uses him. It's clear enough to Erik that that's what's happening. He'd have been offended, once, but it's been ten years since anyone has touched him, and so it hardly matters if the contact that comes is on the other end of a closed fist or a rough fucking.

Erik's never come just from having a cock in his ass, but there's a first time for everything, and he's starting to think it's going to happen this time. It's not even the stretch and burn of Charles inside him so much as the warm solidness of Charles' chest against his back, by far the most intimate aspect of the thing. He's starting to get close when Charles changes angles—just slightly, but it's better, and Erik can't help but groan.

"Shut up," Charles hisses. "They'll hear you."

"You think they don't already know?" Erik asks. It's typical, from what he remembers; Charles relies on his telepathy so much that he can hardly wrap his mind around the idea that other people notice the world around them. No one has to hear them to know there are few _other_ reasons for two men to lock themselves in a small bathroom together for fifteen minutes; and no matter how quiet they are, there's nothing that can be done about the smell.

Charles doesn't seem to have an answer for this, other than to change angles again, thrusts becoming even more brutal. It can't be another minute before he stiffens, muffling his own groan against Erik's back, then sagging against him.

It's so close to enough, but it isn't. Erik aches, more than he ever has before. He could finish himself off in a few strokes, but instead he finds himself saying, " _Please_."

There's a moment when he thinks Charles won't. Thinks he'll tuck himself back in and leave Erik to fend for himself. It wouldn't be the first time. But then Charles' right hand slides around from Erik's hip. His fingers curl around the shaft, and mid-way through the first stroke, Erik comes, crying out much more loudly than he'd intended.

Charles does leave, then. Takes his hand away the moment Erik's cock jerks, has deprived Erik of his body heat by the time he slumps boneless against the sink. By the time he's recovered enough to pull his pants up, Charles has long since left and closed the door behind him. By the time Erik follows him out on still-trembling legs, Charles is sitting in his seat again, one leg crossed over the other, ignoring Erik even more studiously than Hank (who is very, very red in contrast to how blue he'll be tomorrow, and refuses to leave the cockpit even when Charles offers to spell him for a bit).

Erik's known what he's going to do in Paris ever since Charles and the man from the future told him about Raven. In a way, it's a relief that there's no more than a hint of softness in anything that happened on that plane, and none at all in what happened at the back. It means he's giving up less, when he does what he has to do.

***

After Paris, after D.C., Erik's on the run again. He's as alone as he was in that cell, but infinitely freer. It doesn't bother him that he has nowhere to go, nothing except what he takes; he's been here before, but this time he's not little more than a child, not chasing after a monster he's now long since dealt with. This time, he has the benefit of experience, having done all this already. This time, he has a cause greater than himself, one that will carry him through his life once he finds the right allies. He's been vindicated, and if he never wanted to be certain mutantkind would eventually be wiped out, knowing what's coming gives him the resolve he might otherwise have lost along the way.

For the first few months, as he tries to rebuild the Brotherhood and finds time and time again that the people he would want are never willing to associate themselves with a fugitive hunted the world over, he pays little attention to the symptoms. If he's hungry for odder food combinations than ever before, he's had ten years of the blandest possible meals. If he's nauseated much of the time, look at what he's been eating. If his joints complain more than expected, if his abdomen began to round where he'd always been flat before—all of that, surely, was no more than a reaction to a sudden change in circumstances. It's no different than the way he can barely stand to be out in daylight without shades on, or the way being in a crowd sometimes makes him want nothing more than to flee to somewhere quiet and small and contained; all of it's caused by what came before, and all of it can be overcome if he ignores it.

Then the hallucinations begin.

This time, they're nothing like the conversations he used to have in the dark, when the night seemed to drag on for days (and, he's convinced, sometimes did; he's not human, so why would his jailers bother to turn the lights on in his tomb when they hadn't even bothered with a fair trial?). He used to argue with Charles, with Mystique, even with Shaw; sometimes his mother came, and in his lowest moments Erik had asked her to save him, begged her to get him out of this.

This time, it's no one he knows who's come to see him. It's just a feeling, sometimes, of a warmth, a presence. Even though he's lost the helmet again, Erik knows the presence isn't Charles; for one thing, Charles would never be able to resist sharing his opinion, everything that's wrong about Erik's mindset, his goals. How it would all be better if he simply came around to Charles' own views on things. And because it isn't Charles, and because it has nothing terrible to say to him like any of the rest, there's no harm in enjoying the company.

Sometimes, the presence _wants_ things, usually the same things Erik's been wanting anyway—a pickle sandwich, a fatty steak, a handful of dirt or clay. It usually turns out fine, except when what they both want is something that's not food. He's Magneto, not a five year old, but it takes all his will not to give in, and those days are a misery for it.

He goes through days, weeks, months in a fog, seeming to pursue his own goals on the surface, when really he's always thinking of that presence, when it's filled his mind nearly to the exclusion of all else. It nearly gets him captured just inside the Polish border; afterward, he asks himself why he ever thought of bringing a child here in the first place, and turns away.

It's not until he's well away that he asks himself, _What_ child? and finds he already knows. He's known for a while. Perhaps he knew from the beginning, and dismissed it as absurd. Perhaps he put it together piece by piece, just beneath the surface. Either way, it hardly matters. Either way, it changes nothing.

That night, his mother comes to him again. For the first time, she's as she was so many years ago, when he was a young boy; for the first time, he hears the strain behind it when she takes him into her lap—there was already less of it than there'd been before—and says, "How would you like to have a brother or a sister?"

It had been a sister. In the end, little Ruth had lived for all of six months before succumbing to scarlet fever in one of many outbreaks of disease. Erik hadn't thought of her in many years, but now he finds himself wondering how much longer she would have lived if they hadn't been forced into the ghetto.

"How would you like to be a grandmother?" Erik asks of his mother's ghost. Before she can answer, he wakes up weeping, and he knows: He could raise a child in the life he's living now, but he won't. Perhaps it should have made some difference, knowing that an infant would make the perfect camoflage, that those who hunted him would look right past a new father traveling with an infant—but the thought, when it passes through his mind, wearies him.

***

In the end, there's nowhere else to go. 

A week after he makes his decision, Erik arrives at Charles' house in Westchester. It's not what he expected, somehow, from the dusty mansion he left eleven years ago. For one thing, there are far more work crews around than he'd imagined—but that makes it easier to sneak in. If you walk briskly and borrow a hard hat, no one ever asks you what you think you're doing.

He finds Charles easily enough; he's looking for the wheelchair now, the way he wasn't in D.C., and he finds it with no trouble at all outside of a few wrong turns. He locates Charles by one of the staircases, speaking animatedly to yet more workmen. Erik's been watching him for three minutes before Charles' mouth snaps shut in the middle of a sentence, and he turns to look at Erik, eyes widening.

"If you'll excuse me for a few minutes," he says. He approaches Erik, says, "Not here," and motions for Erik to follow.

He does, and soon they're in a little office, with a desk stacked with folders and many reminders pinned to carious corkboards on the walls.

Charles closes the door and says, "Erik...what are you doing here?"

Erik's looking for the softness he didn't find the last time; it's not there now, either, although Charles does seem different, somehow—more irritated, less broken. It's only now that he realizes how wretched Charles really looked, the last time.

"I need your help," Erik admits. "For the next month or two. Maybe longer."

"...What kind of help?"

Erik's not eaten since last night, and what he's had over the course of his trip has rarely been what he really wanted. He'd not sure how Charles can be missing it; if he's in the chair, that means his telepathy will be back, too, which means he should be hearing it, sensing it for himself.

"Sensing what?" Charles raises his hand to his temple. His eyes grow even wider than they had been when he'd noticed Erik himself. "...What on earth?"

"I'm," Erik says, and the word, 'pregnant' refuses to leave his mouth.

Thankfully, he's speaking to a telepath, one who has no apparent qualms about traipsing all over his mind. " _Really_ ," Charles scoffs. "That's a _good_ one. What's next? I suppose you're going to try to convince me it's mine!"

Erik hasn't given that a single thought, actually. Not until this moment. He came here for sanctuary for himself and his child, not because Charles might be—not because he certainly _is_ the child's other father. If Erik had been able to conceive a child without help, he'd have done it in his cell because he couldn't bear to be alone for another month, another day, another hour.

"Look for yourself," Erik says, and for just a moment he wavers, wondering if he hasn't been imagining it all after all—creating a presence, making a strange friend for himself, the way he did in the years he was alone.

Then Charles' forehead wrinkles in concentration, and then he says, "...Oh." His face softens, a hint of the expression Erik remembers from a decade before. "How wonderful."

Delight rises inside Erik, from that presence within him that isn't itself—it likes being spoken to by another telepath, even if neither of them can tell exactly what it is that Charles is saying.

***

"Of course you can stay," Charles says, once he's finished playing. He's not as warm with Erik as he is with the other, but he's not as cold as he was before, either; if the caution remains, the suspicion seems to be mostly gone. "As long as you need to."

Erik takes a room just down the hall from Charles'. Within days, there's a baby crib in the corner, awaiting use; within weeks, it's filled with blankets and onesies, and surrounded by excessive amounts of everything Charles is convinced the baby will need.

During the days, Erik wanders the house, visiting the kitchen with some frequency. Most nights, he and Charles play chess in his study, games that become friendlier as the days and weeks go by.

Erik's not sure of his plans for when the baby comes. He doesn't know how long they'll stay, if Charles will ever ask...or even what he'll say if Charles does. For the moment, it's enough that they're in a safe place, and neither of them alone.


End file.
